


Captain Kirk vs. the Draka

by SMJB



Category: Draka Series - S. M. Stirling, Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-01
Updated: 2019-12-01
Packaged: 2021-02-24 16:33:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21621016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SMJB/pseuds/SMJB
Summary: Captain Kirk finds an alternate Earth where one of the dominant factions embodies literally everything the Federation (and he personally) despises.
Kudos: 8





	Captain Kirk vs. the Draka

**Author's Note:**

> This is another [port](https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/miscellaneous-drakaverse-ideas.430836/page-4#post-16483571) from alternatehistory.com.

Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Development had allowed the crew of the Enterprise to see some truly weird paths Earth might have gone down. They'd seen a world where the USA and USSR had obliterated each other in nuclear war. They'd seen a world where the Roman Empire never fell. There was a world out there where most of the Americas were conquered early on by a tribe that practiced a weird form of pseudo-communism and wore tattoos eerily reminiscent of the Maori. There were many worlds that were parallel to Earth, or Vulcan, or one of the other main federation worlds, and made one wonder if the world they were from could have gone down the same route. They were rarely happy endings--there was a _reason_ the Federation were the ones visiting them, and not vice versa--but this one took the proverbial cake.

For all his logic, methodology, and training, the most prominent thought in Spock's mind regarding this world was how _wrong_ it was. And, in spite of one of the two major powers being as backwards and savage as it could possibly be, this world was generally technologically ahead of where the Federation's Earth was at the date it claimed to be.

What had Spock worried was the captain; Kirk's usual brash manner had given way to something else, something cold and contemplative. Knowing the captain like he did, and knowing his history on Tarsus IV and the mad Governor Kodos, Spock's conclusion was that Kirk was absolutely _livid_ and planned to do something about this version of Earth that would be...dramatic.

The fact that they would be violating the Prime Directive was a foregone conclusion, but that didn't worry Spock; any decent Starfleet captain on a mission like theirs would violate the Prime Directive more than a dozen times in their career--and given the particular nature of this world, Spock suspected that Kirk would practically have to raze the Dominion of the Draka to the ground before Starfleet decided to cashier him. The thing that worried Spock was, Kirk _might_

After observing this star system for a week, Kirk gathered his senior officers and explained what his plan was.

~

The _Enterprise_ emerged from its hiding place in the atmosphere of “Saturn”--in spite of never inventing the impeller, the locals were very active in their space--and went into warp, coming out of it in geostationary orbit over Africa. It was midnight in Archona when the Enterprise reached out with its scanners and transporters. Transporters weren't often thought of as weapons due to how easy they were to block...you know, assuming you had the technology to make them in the first place; if you didn't, well, the Draka were about to find out just how powerless they were on a galactic scale.

The Stone Dogs were the first to go, the ultimate weapon of the Draka--or rather, the individual constituent atoms thereof--disappearing and reappearing as a dust cloud a surrounding the Enterprise. Then went the Draka's entire nuclear arsenal. Then the Enterprise's transporters locked onto the computers, only this time they did a slightly more sophisticated trick. It wasn't much of a task for a transporter rated to recreate a human mindstate to the subatomic level to misplace a few key electrons in a piece of circuitry, or create an “error” in the wiring of a microchip that turns it into a completely different microchip. For the vast majority of the computers in the Dominion of the Draka, all future attempts to boot it would result only in displaying the message TODAY YOUR CIVILIZATION ENDS in the Draka dialect of English. Then the tanks and attack airplanes and all the other modern methods of waging war the Draka possessed down to the last citizen's hunting rifle all disappeared, only to reappear in territory controlled by the Alliance for Democracy.

This was a process that took some time, and the _Enterprise_ was noticed. The locals attempted to hail them. Kirk ignored them. The Draka fleet noticed they weren't getting any replies from Earth when they asked for orders. In a rare gamble at cooperation, the admiral of the Draka fleet asked his counterpart in the Alliance for Democracy fleet if they were having the same problem; presumably this was in the hopes that if this was universal they could join forces (though he was gravely underestimating the pure vitriolic hatred the Alliance had for his kind if he thought even an alien invasion could get them to bury the hatchet), though he was rewarded with her telling him that, no, this was purely a Draka problem.

A Draka ship with a nervous captain fired a missile. The _Enterprise_ calculated its trajectory and decided to leave it unmolested; the primitive nuke blew itself up uselessly against the _Enterprise's_ shields, but did create quite the chain reaction in the fleets. The Alliance for Democracy could not assume this wasn't an attack, and launched the New America at the nearest star, which every Draka commander knew was an act of war, so the the fleets attacked each other. Well, the Draka _tried_ to attack; the Enterprise, however, used its tractor beams to nudge every missile they fired ever so slightly. The tractor beam would only touch a missile for a fraction of a second, but in that fraction of a second the missile expirienced ten million gravities of acceleration sideways, causing it to fly very far from its target and eventually be ejected from Earth's Hill Sphere. Well, theoretically; mostly, they were tossed into other missiles to save time.

There were some casualties on the Alliance side--on the exact opposite side of the planet from the Enterprise, where its tractor beam couldn't reach, a couple of Draka ships were making a good showing of themselves in spite of what had suddenly become horrendous odds--but all in all, it was a route.

Down on the Earth, a note appeared on the desk of the President of the United States:

 _Madam President:_ <

_The Draka on the planet have been disarmed. Completely._

_I'm going to clear the snakes out of space; be back soon._

_\--Kirk_

And up in orbit, the Enterprise transported everyone in the Draka moonbase to the Earth and then went into warp; when it came out, it was practically on top of a Draka ship.

To scanners that could sequence DNA from a thousand kilometers away, the ship might as well have been made of glass and the computers' coding written on billboards. The state of the ship's computers were logged in the _Enterprise's_ emulators and translated, and because they helpfully had the entire crew's DNA on file the _Enterprise_ was able to transport out every slave and captive on board before atomizing the weapons and overwriting the computers like they'd done to the Dominion on Earth. The tractor beam then launched the ship into a trajectory that would bring it back to Earth with just enough fuel to decelerate once they got there and the engines programmed to do so. Only the life support systems were left unmolested.

~

“And were the crews of the ships you did this to informed of this fact?” Admiral Hwai asked, much later.

“In a manner of speaking,” Kirk said with impish glee.

Hwai rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Explain.”

“I believe the message that would appear if the crew tried to boot their computers was YOU'RE NOT EVEN WORTH KILLING,” Kirk explained.

~

There were hundreds of Draka ships in the solar system, and doing this to all of them took nine hours. Bones and Chapel had to work themselves and several assistants to the bone to keep up with it all, but in the end they managed to stay on top of the situation until the _Enterprise_ returned to Earth and transported its refugees to the surface.

The crew of one of the first Draka ships they'd siezed control of managed to regain enough control to flip the ship around, turning the deceleration burn into an accelaration burn, apparently going on a kamikaze run. The _Enterprise_ interposed itself between the Draka ship and the Earth and just sat there, not even pretending to be in orbit, only making slight alterations to its position to remain between the ship and the planet.

~

“Why?” Hwai asked.

“I just wanted to drive home the point that conventional physics as they understood it didn't apply to me,” Kirk said.

“As if they couldn't figure _that_ out just from looking at the _Enterprise's_ design.”

~

“Initiate the signal,” Kirk said, and with the press of a button all those computer and television screens reading TODAY YOUR CIVILIZATION ENDS (and eventually those reading YOU'RE NOT EVEN WORTH KILLING, giving allowances for light lag) were picking up a live feed from the _Enterprise_.

Those watching the feed (which was also being transmitted to the Aliance for Democracy, albeit less aggressively) would see Lieutenant Kyle in the transporter room, fiddling with the controls. Then they would hear Kirk's voice through Kyle's communicator. “Do you have a lock on the Archon, Mr. Kyle?”

“Aye captain.”

“Beam him aboard. Be aware that he is, ah, potentially hostile.”

“Understood,” Kyle said, flipping on the shield.

In a bunker underneath Archona, Eric Von Shrakenberg, supreme ruler of the Dominion of the Draka, disappeared, reappearing on a screen that was receiving this feed.

“What is the meaning of this?” the Archon demanded.

“Patience is a virtue,” Kyle allowed himself to quip.

Von Shrakenberg charged at him, getting a facefull of forcefield for his trouble. Kyle chuckled. Von Shrakenberg glared.

Kirk entered. “Eric Von Shrakenberg, I presume,” he said.

“Who are you and what do you want?”

“James Tiberius Kirk of the United Federation of Planets, captain of the USS _Enterprise_. The Alliance for Democracy is about to attack; given the fact that I've taken the liberty of transferring to them possession of all of the Dominion's weapons--all the way down to the last hunting rifle--I _suggest_ as an, ah, neutral party that you surrender unconditionally.”

“'Neutral' my ass.”

Kirk grinned savagely. “Technically speaking, not a single citizen of the Dominion died as a _direct_ result of my actions. I merely took away their ability to not suffer from the consequences of their own decisions.”

Spock's voice came over the communicator. “The _Fury_ has been intercepted, Captain.”

“Acknowledged,” Kirk said. “Correction: _very few_ Draka have died as a direct result of my actions. But considering that they were trying to ram the planet and ended up ramming my ship instead, I'd call that one a wash.”

Shrakenberg glared at Kirk, full of impotent fury. “And if I don't surrender?”

“Why, I send you back to Earth, of course,” Kirk said with palpably fake innocence.

“To a jail cell in Alabama, I take it?”

“Something like that, though I _do_ confess the temptation to 'miss' the ground by half a kilometer is strong. Either way, I'll then have a chat with the next person in the line of succession. And then the next. And then the next. Sooner or later, one of you snakes is going to see reason.”

Shrakenberg glared. “It could be that this is the day the Draka are broken. It could be that surrender is the sensible thing to do, before too many of my people die needlessly. _But I will not be the one to break them!_ ”

Kirk nodded solemnly. “You know, according to your own philosophy, I have the right to kill you, to do anything I want to you, because I am stronger than you, which I have proven by beating you. And the universe will certainly be a better place without you in it. But I am not going to do that; I'm not feeling that merciful. You are going to live, and you are going to watch, as everything you've made, everything your so-called civilization has ever accomplished, turns to ash.” He nodded to Kyle. “Send him to Pennsylvania.”

The Archon disappeared.

“Got a lock on the next target?”

“Aye, captain.”

“Beam him aboard.”

Kyle did so.

Kirk grinned. “Congratulations on your promotion to Archon! You were watching, I trust, what happened to the last one?”

~

“...and, well, eventually one did see reason. We shared a cure for the _servus_ and _drakensis_ gene mods Bones had whipped up with the AfD and stuck around long enough to make sure no one else tried to k-bomb the planet, taking advantage of the stay to coordinate with AfD forces and organize the carving up of the Dominion.”

Hwai nodded. “Some of your actions were questionable, but understandable given the circumstances. You're of course going to be court martialed, because this is Star Fleet and we court martial you for everything, but I doubt you're in any serious trouble. What concerns me is...well, I trust you're familiar with Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Development?”

“In a universe in which the creation of organizations with the mission statement of 'protecting the timeline' is desirous, necessary, and possible, those who would seek to alter the timeline will often realize that it'd be much easier to mess with the evolution of an unprotected world and start their own civilization instead. The desires, capabilities, and resources of these history changers being highly variable, the results will also be highly variable. Hence why we live in a universe full of humanoid races that presumably all have a shared origin somewhere back in a reality that has been overwritten a thousand times by now and many of those races have 'alternate history' versions of their homeworlds scattered throughout the universe.”

“Exactly. I've been looking at that world's history, as you reported it, and it's bullshit. Someone laid their thumbs on the scales heavily to make it possible for the Dominion of the Draka to come about, survive, and flourish. They were not even particularly subtle when crafting that world's demented history.”

Kirk shrugged. “That's for future Star Fleet to deal with.”

“Indeed it is, captain. Scotch?”

“Please.”

The admiral poured them a couple glasses. “Here's hoping they gut the bastard.”

“Cheers to that.”


End file.
